A teen on the Alaska Airlines flight had his shirt ripped off when the door plug blew. A stranger tried to help calm him down.
A teenage passenger had his shirt ripped off his body when a door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines plane during a flight Friday. Fellow passenger Kelly Bartlett told CBS News senior transportation and national correspondent Kris Van Cleave the teenage boy was moved from his seat after the incident and sat next to her for the remainder of the harrowing flight.
Barlett described a "really loud boom" shortly after the Boeing 737 Max 9 took off from Portland, Oregon. "And the plane just filled with air," she said. "You could just feel the breeze. It was more than a breeze."
She said the first few minutes after that were "chaos." Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling and as she put hers on, Barlett said, someone jumped over her aisle seat.
"And somebody – there was a seat next to me that was open in the middle, and somebody just kind of jumped over me, plopped down in the middle seat, grabbed a mask and put it on. It was this kid, and he didn't have a shirt on," she said.
"And it was all just chaotic and confusing. I thought, 'Where did you come from?' Like, I didn't understand where he was coming from, why he was sitting there, and why he didn't have a shirt on," she said.
She soon realized her new seatmate had come from the row where the wall panel had blown out of the plane.
Because they had their oxygen masks on and the wind blowing through the hole in the plane was too loud, they couldn't communicate by talking. "So, I was using the notes app on my phone. And I just typed out - I said, 'Are you hurt?' Because I realized that he came from whatever chaos was happening behind me, which I wasn't clear on at the time."
The teen wrote back that his arm was a bit scratched and it was "unbelievable." "Thanks for your kindness," he wrote.
They continued to type messages together in her notes app and she found out he was a 15-year-old named Jack and he and his mom were in the middle and aisle seat of the affected row. "I just can't imagine how scary that must have been for him and his mom," Bartlett said.
Jack and his mother were separated in their new seats, Barlett said, and he seemed worried. "He was asking about his mom, and I kept telling him that I'm sure she was safe and that they found a seat for her. It was just further up and he couldn't see her. I know I said that a couple of times," she said. "I just, I didn't feel like anything I said was going to be enough to really reassure him until he got back together with his mom. So, I really wanted that for him."
When the plane landed, Jack and his mom were reunited, Barlett said.
Bartlett said she is a mom of teenagers. "I can't even imagine. To be him in that situation, and to be thrown out of the plane like that," she said. "His seatbelt saved his life. And he lost his phone. He lost his laptop. But I'm so glad it wasn't worse. And I can't imagine being his mom in that situation. She pulled him back in. And then the flight attendants helped them find safe seats. But it is so scary."
The flight took off from Portland International Airport at 4:52 p.m. Pacific time. After the incident, the pilot told air traffic control that the flight had depressurized. The plane reached approximately 16,000 feet – about six minutes into the flight – before descending again and landing back in Portland at around 5:30 p.m.
Despite there being a gaping hole in the wall of the plane, Bartlett said the plane felt "under control." "Yes, it was windy. And when I looked over my shoulder, I could see a big hole in the side of the plane, which was not ideal," she said. "But, it did not feel like we were doing a nosedive into the ground. So, that helped. And I knew that the only thing we could do was just stay buckled in. Keep our masks on. The flight attendants helped everyone right away."
In a second interview with CBS News on Friday afternoon, Bartlett again complimented the crew's response.
"The descent actually felt very controlled," Bartlett said. "I did not feel like we were going to crash. It seemed like we were going back down to the ground, which is all anyone wanted to do. And as soon as we landed, there were cheers and claps, everyone was relieved. You could feel the adrenaline level was really high, the stress level was really high."
She said paramedics then boarded the plane immediately and asked if anyone was hurt. Those people were taken off first to be treated, and then the rest of the passengers disembarked as normal.
"We didn't have to take an emergency exit, it was just all normal," Bartlett said.
Bartlett was rebooked on a different flight, and she successfully reached her destination that same night.
"It was very scary to go on another plane," Bartlett said. "But honestly it was probably the best thing to do, because otherwise, that memory of that flight would have been my last memory of flying, and I don't know if I ever could have flown again."
Alaska Airlines said in a statement on Friday that it was taking "the precautionary step of temporarily grounding our fleet of 65 Boeing 737-9 aircraft."
"Each aircraft will be returned to service only after completion of full maintenance and safety inspections. We anticipate all inspections will be completed in the next few days," the statement continued. In a later statement, and the airline said they had conducted inspections on a quarter of their 737-9 planes with "no concerning findings." Aircraft will return to service "as their inspections are completed with our full confidence," the statement said.
But on Monday, both United Airlines and Alaska Airlines said they found loose hardware on door plugs on several of their grounded Boeing 737 Max 9 planes.
Boeing said it was working on getting further information and has a technical team standing by to support the investigation.
National Transportation Safety Board officials held a briefing about the investigation into the incident on Monday. Four bolts that were helping to hold the blown out plug in place are unaccounted for – and they don't know if those bolts were ever there are broke off the plane.
Several items were sucked out of the plane when the panel blew out and on Monday, Washington resident Sean Bates said he found a phone on the side of the road that came from the plane. He said the iPhone was "still in airplane mode with half a battery and open to a baggage claim" for the plane involved and that it still had a piece of a charger still stuck inside. The phone appears to be intact and working, according to Bates.
In 2018, a passenger on a Southwest Airlines flight was partially sucked out of a plane window when a bit of shrapnel that blew from the plane's engine broke the window. Jennifer Riordan, who died from blunt trauma to the head, neck and torso, according to a Philadelphia medical examiner, could have been fully sucked out of the plane had she not been wearing her seatbelt, retired United Airlines captain Ross Aimer told CBS News' Elaine Quijano at the time.
"You have an incredible amount of pressure trying to rush out of that small opening – it could literally suck a larger person – they could become so small, they go through that window," Aimer said.
Aliza Chasan, Brian Dakss Gina Martinez, Aimee Picchi and Li Cohen contributed to this report.